What’s that thing in the corner, that stuffed-to-bursting bag of skin making a blurping noise, like one of those hard-to-unsee photos of a python that swallowed an alligator in a fatal case of overreaching, and now they’re both stuck?

All of the above have had their public expenses questioned by, well, the public long after they’d been spent and agreed to in private. That’s the thing about expenses: they may be justifiable or at least arguable but in the cold light of day, the expenses of other people will always look shameless, no matter how pristine they may have been.

I do think Troop was unfairly attacked for expensing a $1.89 cup of tea. It is a fluid. If he ingested it while discussing the games to be held in Toronto next year, then it’s an expense, fair enough. I don’t want a dehydrated person negotiating deals on our behalf and you have to be beyond charming to get Starbucks to give you a glass of tap water with your dry pastry.

In the end though, Troop probably just looked at a heap of those tiny slips of paper coated with plastic containing carcinogenic bisphenol A — always wash your hands after doing your taxes — and asked a staffer to add it up and file it, the more fool him.

The phrase “cup of tea” will trail him for the rest of his life and that’s the problem with expenses. They are petty. The pettier they are, the better the story.

If you work for the public, a smart employee doesn’t expense anything under $5. Equally, be careful with anything over five grand. It’s the middle bits that no one will notice.

Ah, large sums. Fennell earned $213,000 in 2013, with a third of that tax-free, and not including a regional top-up. She has now admitted to having quietly reduced that salary by $23,000 so that she would not be described as Canada’s highest-paid mayor. No male would have done this. This is the opposite of “leaning in.” I would call it “falling backwards,” I would call it the I Know This Looks Bad defence, a Troop’s tea.

The $3,191 for a seat upgrade to India seems reasonable, as it lowers the number of days it takes to recover from a flight to India, or anywhere outside North America. But a car and driver? No mayor should have that.

If mayors took public transit, we would have gleaming slipstream trains and buses, with smooth wide empty roads for those who still bothered to drive. I think about this as I drag myself onto filthy battered buses filling in for subways shut down for weekend maintenance. Toronto has terrible transit because we have an alcoholic mayor who has to be driven to work.

As in the case of Mayor Ford, there is something wrong with Fennell and a system that didn’t set political/financial limits. She has no shame so she decided to fake it.

Toronto voters have grown so accustomed to analyzing the roots of the Ford family dysfunction that we see wads of psychological meaning in every little item on every expense account. But the fact is that politicians should live like the voters they serve.

Harper sent two armoured cars and a bulletproof SUV to India at a cost of $1.2 million. May I buy two more Toyotas and send my fleet over? It’s only fair.